I’ve been covering ‘food’ a lot while on honeymoon. Mostly because we’re gluttons who love their food.
Anyway, this time around it’s the height of German cuisine.
The dish ‘pommes’ consist of half a chip and a currywurst sliced up and drowned in spicy BBQ sauce and topped with a generous sprinkling of curry powder.
OMG Taste explosion! Don’t let the pictures put you off!
Last night a small group of blokes descended on Belfast to watch The Dark Knight, latest in a long line of Batman movies. Before I get into any specifics which the reader may want to skip – let me just say – that movie is LONG. I expected the credits to roll a couple of times!
The Dark Knight lacks the style of Batman Begins. It’s action packed to be sure but there’s much too much of it and not enough acting and dialogue. The only person who actually gets to do any acting is Heath Ledger and maybe that was a decision made on the cutting room floor; considering this was the actor’s last film it would seem they took the opportunity to give him the stage. Batman Begins was a character piece. The Dark Knight is a lot of explosions and fighting.
As I mentioned before, I think Wordpress for iPhone really misses the mark. It doesn’t really add anything to the existing apps that are out there – look at iPhoneSlide which I’ve used a couple of times. It has much the same capabilities and works straight from your email client (and because it uses email, is available from within the Camera application on iPhone without having to take a picture, then switch apps. It also doesn’t have that nasty picture-attachment bug which causes crashing and means your post has to be recovered every time. In my opinion, this release from Wordpress was not ‘rushed’ so much as it just needs a rethink about what features they were intending to put in.
I’d like to see an interface for comment moderation and replies. I mean, some of the web based mobile interfaces allow this. The software as-is is a posting machine. It needs to be a conversation machine. This part of it is completely missing and that’s somewhat inexcusable.
I’d like the ability to place an image (even just as an icon placeholder), center it if necessary and allow the user to place some text underneath the image. At this point it does no better than the email services as it just adds the content as an attachment at the bottom.
The app is now relegated to my back screens for “software I likely won’t use much” until there’s a significant update. The next step is simply removal.
Earlier this week I promised a bake-off between the HTC Touch Diamond and the iPhone 3G but I’m sorry to say that I’m going to have to cry defeat.
The Diamond is a lovely piece of hardware. It’s a ‘candy bar’ phone, very compact, sold-feeling, well put-together and with a gorgeous high resolution screen.
The TouchFLO software is very nice. It’s beautiful. It’s high-contrast, it’s touch-enhanced and the text ad email reading applications really make use of the screen. Others had said it was slow but the version we had was quite fluid. It was later that things bogged down.
It becomes apparent that the TouchFLO interface is just a veneer on the Windows Mobile software below which, if it had some sort of consistency wouldn’t be so bad.
HerIndoors was getting rid of her First Generation iPhone and getting into a Diamond because she wanted the best phone and it’s certainly the best looking phone out there. Phones, much like shoes and bags, are a fashion accessory. But after using it for 24 hours, she tearfully admitted that she hated it and wanted to go back to using the iPhone. Her reasons:
Some things worked really well. As I mentioned, TouchFLO is really nice. And the camera in the Diamond really is very good, providing decent enough resolution, great autofocus and, in the end, some pretty great shots.
Muddling through and using MarkSpace’s MissingSync software we managed to get contacts and photos synchronised (though Music was a problem) and she set about using it. The browser in TouchFLO is not as fast and responsible as MobileSafari so that when you’re actually using the device, sure, it’s a 3G phone and downloading the information fine, but it’s too slow to navigate around.
Setting the date and time as well was a chore. Scrolling through a huge list to get to the United Kingdom just got us to another list. And if your ’scroll swipes’ hit it wrong then you’d end up selecting another country at random and the process had to start again. There was no way to skip to ‘U’ which there might have been on a phone with a keypad. This isn’t a condemnation of ‘touch’ phones but of an underlying operating system that is designed for keypads.
The speed issue was considerable. Every application took a lot longer than the iPhone equivalent to load and you quickly got glimpses beyond the sleek TouchFLO interface and into the murky world of Windows Mobile. With every tap on the screen you could expect a pregnant pause as the tap was translated to the underlying hardware and the results computed. We’re talking about maybe the difference between half a second and 1.5 seconds but in a device like a phone, a sluggish interface is very noticeable.
Also, the inconsistency between hitting the TouchFLO OK buttons at the bottom of the screen and the Windows Mobile OK button at the top left of the screen made it all more confusing as I was scanning my eyes around trying to figure out where the next OK needed tapping. And, it uses a resistance based screen (not capacitance) which, as I understand it, means it works with a stylus and fingernail but not too well with fingers. That would explain some of the scrolling issues.
These may seem to be relatively minor things but when they add up, it was simply too much. As I mentioned, the hardware is beautiful and we can hope that HTC does something similar with an Android phone later this year. On paper, this phone is a lot better than the iPhone. In execution it is incredibly flawed. This may, on the other hand, suit someone who has low expectations on the usability of a phone, who is used to Windows Mobile (though TouchFLO isn’t anything like Windows Mobile and draws the ire of HTC critics who claim the company is breaking the standard interface.).
So, when she sat down and I suggested we do the bake-off between the Diamond and my new iPhone 3G, she refused and asked me to reformat the device to remove all of her details because it was going back. Boom, that’s that. I don’t blame her because, frankly, I found the whole experience to be a chore and it may be a real shame that I’m now spoiled and expect a UI for my phone that’s simple enough to use without a manual and is responsive to my touch. The HTC Touch Diamond is now repacked back in the box to be exiled back to the supplier.
I spent a couple of hours last night playing Mario Kart Wii against a few friends – one in Mallusk and two in London. I’ve written it up here on Lategaming.
It’s a good game. You should try it.